Senator Schumer and the Democrats have made two very clear decisions in their shutdown strategy:
- They value extending the expanded subsidies for Obamacare premiums more highly than they do keeping the SNAP program (food stamps) solvent.
- Likewise, they also value the expanded Obamacare subsidies more than paying the salaries of over 1,400,000 federal employees. This number would be more than double if not for current private funding of the salaries for military personnel.
The proof is in the pudding. First, Democrats in the Senate have voted “no” fourteen times to a clean continuing resolution to temporarily fund the government. Second, they have also refused to support a bill specifically tailored to fund the Department of Agriculture (which includes SNAP) for a whole year, as well as a separate bill to pay federal employees during the shutdown (voted down on both October 23rd and November 7th).
Our question is this – In the grand scheme of things, are the expanded Obamacare subsidies really that much more important than SNAP and federal salaries? One way to look at it is to play out what would happen in the next month if the Dems stick to their priority order of these three items.
SNAP –
While funding for SNAP is being debated in the courts at present, we see no possible way the courts can end up forcing SNAP to be funded as long as there is no approved budget. Apart from the Constitutional pandemonium this would cause, a court precedent that allows an Administration to spend money that has not been authorized by Congress during a shutdown leads to a range of possibilities neither party wants to see.
For example, what would stop Trump from deciding to hire 100,000 more ICE agents with money not approved by Congress? For that matter, why would the Administration ever want the government re-opened if they could spend money on whatever they want with no limits in place from the Legislative branch? Democrats should be careful of what they are wishing for in court.
In addition to these legal machinations over SNAP, the even more obvious problem is that people who rely on this money to eat won’t get it. As we’ve seen during the last week, there are state-level stopgaps that can be used in the short term like food banks and charities to cover the deficit. But with 42 million people needing to be fed (a number that astounds us), those remedies won’t last long and chaos will soon follow.
Federal Employees –
The next 30 days are the worst time of year for anyone to go without paychecks. Thanksgiving and Christmas are times when families spend a lot on gifts, travel, and special meals. It is also a time of big revenue for retailers, some of whom earn half their annual income during this holiday period. With 1.4 million people suddenly not receiving a paycheck, and with no clear end to the drought, this would cause a significant economic downturn, not to mention heartache for so many families of federal employees.
Expanded Obamacare Subsidies –
First, some context. Prior to COVID, Obamacare was operating with subsidies that were part of the original Affordable Care Act of 2010. Lower income Obamacare participants were able to afford their premiums using those subsidies. At the height of COVID in 2021, a package of relief benefits was signed into law that, among many other things, temporarily expanded those Obamacare subsidies to a larger audience until COVID subsided. In August 2022, Joe Biden signed into law a bill passed by Democrats which would continue paying those expanded subsidies until December of 2025 when it was deemed the COVID crisis period would be over.
Thus, if the shutdown continues for another 30 days from today, there will be no change at all to the expanded Obamacare subsidies since they don’t expire until December 31st. And once these expanded subsidies do expire, it does not eliminate health coverage for anyone. It simply raises the premiums to what they would have been if COVID hadn’t happened.
Those premiums will obviously cost more for some people on January 1st than they do now (since the expanded subsidies are still in effect now). Starting next year, a portion of the population may not be able to afford the higher premium and will have to search for another insurance option or do without it entirely.1 Bad as that outcome may sound to some, it has no equivalency whatsoever to the scenario of no SNAP funding and no paychecks for 1.4 million federal workers through the holiday season, both of which would likely have catastrophic outcomes in the very short term if the shutdown continues.
These upside-down priorities are patently absurd. It’s more than obvious that the reasoning of the Democrat leadership for keeping the government closed has little to do with preserving expanded Obamacare subsidies and everything to do with some twisted notion of political advantage over President Trump. That is the only thing they genuinely value.
As of this writing, it appears there is a fracture forming among Senate Democrats who may break with their leadership and vote to open the government without any expanded Obamacare subsidies as part of the deal. Maybe the real-life consequences of how they’ve ordered their priorities is finally coming clear to them. We will see what unfolds this week.
1 While there is no longer any Obamacare penalty for not having health insurance, some states impose their own penalty which could affect those choosing to go without.
6 Responses
There were so many hidden agendas in government that we may never be able to shovel through the heap of lies. Thank God for Trump and his team for feverishly digging and uncovering the truth, scary as the truth may be.
Thank you both for taking time to write the article. I found it very informative.
Thanks Jennifer. We didn’t mention it in the article, but I think there is a strong possibility of a lot of federal employee resignations happening once this shutdown ends. No one likes a job with a continuing possibility of not getting paid. When this shutdown ends, it is almost certain to result in another continuing resolution for a couple months or so. While the government will be open, you now have a short term deadline for another potential shutdown. A great number of federal employees live paycheck to paycheck, and the promise of being reimbursed later doesn’t pay the bills in the present. That translates into people having to borrow money, pay penalties for early withdrawals from retirement accounts, or applying for unemployment benefits. That’s very painful to go through once, and we suspect a lot of feds will change jobs so they don’t have that always hanging over their heads for the next few years.
Good point. What a mess 🤯
Sorry, my rant…
The Dems have dug in on this shutdown. They really showed whose party is more popular with the people of this country by defeating the Republicans in three elections in very blue states that Dems win 90% of the time. FOX News helped with wall to wall coverage for months on elections that were never really close. Dems were previously reeling nationally until FOX and Republican leaders got out over their skis and poked every sleeping Dem bear they could find for elections that were super long shots for Republicans. Anyway, I personally wanted Zoro to win. It’s time to let them fail. His true identity will be unmasked over the next years and states like Florida will benefit with another exodus from NYC.
On side-note, Republican Leadership and FOX are doing a terrible job reaching the voters on the shutdown argument. One simple change could help reach more population when they get in front of the camera. They can’t use legislature speak over and over and over. Make it understandable for everyone – dumb it down. They keep repeating “We just want to pass a clean CR.” “We just want a clean Continuing Resolution.” That jargon goes over most of the population’s heads. They even go on to say this is the ‘first’ time a clean CR hasn’t been passed. Uhgg, do you think the general population should all know what it is if it’s the first time? They all should say “We just want to pass a part of the budget again without changing it – leaving it as it was previously.” The Dems say things in street fighting language that some may not like, but everyone knows what they mean. They say “If you don’t add a trillion dollars to that budget, millions of baby’s will die.”
Great points Johnny. Another thing that has gone over most peoples heads is what exactly what hill Schumer and the progressive Dems have chosen to die on. It isn’t the Obamacare subsidies themselves, they remain intact for low earners at the end of the year. It is preserving the COVID relief change made in 2021 that raised the eligibility for those subsidies so that people at higher income levels could receive them. But that’s not how the media (including Fox) and the Dems are characterizing the argument. They constantly refer the Dems position in the shutdown standoff as wanting to prevent the “subsidies” from expiring at the end of the year. Wrong!! The subsidies are not expiring. Only the expanded eligibility for higher earners is expiring. The Republicans should have made this point clearer.
Wow, that is really news to me. You made my case, ty.